Value Your Time and Buy More Books

It’s the one-year anniversary of the A Lesser Photographer book being released by Craft & Vision (they released it recently on Kindle as well). It seems like a good time to revisit why it’s a book at all, not just a set of blog posts.

A Lesser Photographer took around 4 years to write and 6 months to edit. Every sentence was stressed over for clarity and brevity. Every paragraph was inspected and debated to determine what alternative arguments could be made and how to address them.

Craft & Vision hired an illustrator to make the spaces between chapters and the cover beautiful and cohesive. They spent months preparing the book for marketing and for sale. They created a podcast and Jeffery Saddoris interviewed me 4 times to ensure the first episode was just right.

All that work went into a book that costs $5.

Compare this to the mass manufacturing of blog posts. Writers churn them out by the thousands. Little work goes into most of them and they cost the reader hours of the precious time every week. But they’re free, right?

Blogs are becoming increasingly expensive for me. The more I value my time, the more good books I read.